Two people sit across a candlelit table after talking for only a few weeks. They are in love. They are sure of it. And of the one thing that matters most, they have never once spoken a serious word.
What is marriage? Not what it feels like, nor what the world says of it, but what it is. It is a question men think they have answered long before they ask it. They mistake their enthusiasm for wisdom and their hope for knowledge. Yet the question waits. It will be answered in the years that follow, whether it was answered before walking down the aisle or not.
There is something strange about how we live in society today. We treat trivial things with gravity and the most serious matters with a shrug. Simply put, we’re in an age of misplaced priorities. A man will study a contractual agreement for hours to understand every word before penning down his name to buy a house. He will weigh the purchase, compare a hundred small advantages, and guard his money as though it were his soul, to ensure he is getting good value for his money. However, when it comes to the union that will shape his whole life, and the lives of his children, and the temper of his old age, he enters upon it with a feeling, often without sufficient reason. He calls this romantic connection. I think it would be better named “neglect.”
For marriage, rightly understood, is no private arrangement struck for comfort. It is a vocation. It is a sacrament. It is a faithful, lifelong, and procreative union, and it asks of those who would enter it an honesty most couples never reach. The questions that decide a marriage are not the questions lovers delight to ask; not in today’s dating culture. They are harder. They are deep. They are intentional questions: How does this person stand toward their parents, toward siblings? What values have guided and shaped this person’s life? What does this person believe about God, about the faith, about children, about the small daily sacrifices that fill this temporal life?
These are not pleasant questions for courtship. They are avoided precisely because they are weighty. And they are weighty precisely because everything later turns upon them. The conflicts that break a home are seldom strangers. They were present at the beginning, unnamed and unasked, sitting quietly at that candlelit table.
Consider for a moment that courting someone is a kind of interview: One is interviewing another for the office of spouse. The phrase offends the ear of those who often say that going on a date should not feel like “attending an interview”. When a date feels like an interview, it reveals a lack of good social and communication skills, not that the questions are not important. Yet it offends only because we have forgotten what is at stake. Every courtship ends in one of two ways: in marriage or in parting.
The virtue of prudence lies in discerning – with both intellect and reason – before feelings cloud the judgment. And here is a truth most overlook. A breakup, when it comes from honest discernment, is not a failure. It is a success. The failure is to marry without ever having asked the right questions.
It is this honest asking that Thomas L. McFadden, Jr. sets out to teach in A Catholic’s Guide to Finding the Perfect Spouse: With 101 Simple Questions. The book does not ride on mere sentiments. It offers a roadmap. It lays before the reader the very questions that need asking before one steps up to the altar, beginning with the foundation on which all the rest are built: what marriage is, and what its purpose is.
From that foundation, it moves outward, into faith and family, into habit and finances, into the openness to children that the Church names at the heart of the married vocation. These are the substantial, life-altering questions, as Patrick Madrid calls them in the foreword, the ones whose absence so many wedded people later mourn with the same quiet regret: if only we had spoken of these things before. McFadden has written the book so that fewer couples ever need to speak that sentence. What the questions are, how they search the heart, and what they reveal about a person before it is too late to learn, are generously treated in the book itself.
This is the very conviction on which we at the CatholicCourtship were built. We hold that a good marriage begins long before the wedding, and that it begins by beginning rightly. The world calls this dating, and it bids the young to follow their feelings and let reason trail behind. We do not. We are made for courtship, which is the slow and reverent work of two souls discerning together whether God has called them to marriage as a couple. Our matchmakers help our members be introduced to matches based on profound statements of values and a compatible outlook on faith and family life, so that the courtship process may be both joyful and intentional.
Marriage is sacred. It cannot be approached as a mood is approached. It asks not for sentiment but for honesty, and not for chemistry of feelings but for truth. And so, the art our members must learn is the art of asking the right questions during courtship, while there is still light enough to see by, and time enough to choose well.
For this reason, we have added McFadden’s book as a resource guide on our platform. We refer our members to it as help and a companion, so that the conversations by which they come to know one another might run deeper than the pleasant shallows where most courtships linger. A good question, asked early and answered truly, is worth more than a hundred easy evenings. We would have our members ask such questions, and ask them unafraid.
If you would prepare for marriage as seriously as marriage deserves, do not leave the great question unasked. Read A Catholic’s Guide to Finding the Perfect Spouse: With 101 Simple Questions, and learn the questions before love makes you afraid to ask them.
The blog equips Catholic singles with relevant resources and valuable insights, providing a guide to mastering the complexities of courtship with confidence. Our customized content offers clear advice and assistance, helping to build assurance as you forge significant relationships grounded in Catholic principles.
Fides Comitatio writes to offer valuable insights on living out Catholic faith and virtues as young people. With a focus on authentic spirituality and Catholic truth, Fides shares timeless reflections and practices that guide a life of faith.
